From the window of Martin Scorsese's apartment on the 75th floor of a slim midtown skyscraper, Manhattan seems a pretty little thing. Central Park is a toy football field, and the swaying trees a sea of pompoms at half time. In the apartment's foyer, a poster for the furtive Italian classic Ossessione -- good title for nearly any Scorsese project -- auditions you. An old horror film flickers on a projector screen the size of Charles Foster Kane's fireplace. This is where and how God would live if he loved movies.
But is it the right place for Scorsese? His best films -- Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, the new Cape Fear -- live at gutter and gut level. Maybe Steven Spielberg, whose films are aspirations to altitude, deserves to live this high up. In fact, he keeps a facing apartment at the top of another steel stalk a few blocks away. When Scorsese moved here three years ago, Spielberg gave his friend a telescope so that movieland's two most gifted directors could keep an eye on each other. Spielberg may as well have presented him with Patriot missile parts, assembly required. "Steve's the whiz at technical stuff," says Scorsese, 48, who will soon move into a town house, closer to ground zero of the twisted city he loves. "I could never get the thing to work."
Martin Scorsese, the klutz who can get the movie thing to work like no other American filmmaker. Scorsese, the frail, asthmatic fellow whose protagonists arc toward psychopathy, or else start there and keep going. Scorsese, the ex- seminarian whose volcanic film style regularly drives the ratings sentinels bats. Scorsese, the child of Manhattan's Little Italy who today can't watch parts of Raging Bull: "Too upsetting." Scorsese, the four-times-married gent (including to Isabella Rossellini and Barbara De Fina, producer of Cape Fear) whose films are mostly about men in killer conflict. The man embraces multitudes of contradictions. He is also one of the few reasons not to be depressed about current movies.
Yet whether you love his films or hate them -- and to hate them you probably have to be insensitive to the seductive power of movie craft at full throttle -- they are of a piece, easy to spot. Start (in seven of Scorsese's 16 features) with Robert De Niro, the director's onscreen sales rep, reeking menace, ready to pose for a portrait of American evil. Introduce a second character, an audience surrogate, intoxicated by the De Niro magnetism but cramped by conscience. Put them, and a couple dozen other vultures and victims, on the street. Add a knowing rock-'n'-roll sound track, a hurtling camera that always knows where to be and an editing strategy (executed by the brilliant Thelma Schoonmaker) that shaves scenes to the bone and keeps the viewer nicely off kilter.
Scorsese's style reconciles art-house finesse with B-movie excess. And when it finds a subject to match, the result is a Taxi Driver -- brazen, desperate, ) indelible -- or a Raging Bull, which critics' polls called the best movie of the '80s. Cape Fear, while not a project Scorsese originated, has the same preoccupations, the same verve. When one reviewer ticks off the movie's themes, the auteur shrugs and says, "Yeah, sure. Guilt, obsession. All the old stuff. All my old friends."